http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/02/18/sub....ap/index.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The USS Jimmy Carter, set to join the nation's
submarine fleet Saturday, will have some special capabilities,
intelligence experts say: It will be able to tap undersea cables and
eavesdrop on the communications passing through them.

The Navy does not acknowledge that the $3.2 billion submarine, the third
and last of the Seawolf class of attack subs, has this capability.

"There are limits to what I can say on the sub's capabilities, but let's
just say the Jimmy Carter is uniquely capable to perform missions
vitally important to the war on terror," said Rep. Rob Simmons, a
Republican and former CIA officer whose district includes Groton,
Connecticut, where the sub was built.

-----------

Um, does this sound like a 3.2 billion dollar fantasy or what?

On Fri, 18 Feb 2005 22:32:45 -0600, Joe Sensor
wrote:

http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/02/18/sub....ap/index.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The USS Jimmy Carter, set to join the nation's
submarine fleet Saturday, will have some special capabilities,
intelligence experts say: It will be able to tap undersea cables and
eavesdrop on the communications passing through them.

The Navy does not acknowledge that the $3.2 billion submarine, the third
and last of the Seawolf class of attack subs, has this capability.

"There are limits to what I can say on the sub's capabilities, but let's
just say the Jimmy Carter is uniquely capable to perform missions
vitally important to the war on terror," said Rep. Rob Simmons, a
Republican and former CIA officer whose district includes Groton,
Connecticut, where the sub was built.

-----------

Um, does this sound like a 3.2 billion dollar fantasy or what?

Yep. I suspect that they just want people to THINK that the sub can
intercept messages. In reality, the US NSA has many other, more
effective resources for signals intelligence.

Mike T.

"Joe Sensor" wrote in message

http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/02/18/sub....ap/index.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The USS Jimmy Carter, set to join the nation's
submarine fleet Saturday, will have some special capabilities,
intelligence experts say: It will be able to tap undersea cables and
eavesdrop on the communications passing through them.

The Navy does not acknowledge that the $3.2 billion submarine, the
third and last of the Seawolf class of attack subs, has this
capability.

This is old news. It's pretty well known that like 20 years ago the US
tapped a Soviet optical cable in the Pacific Ocean, spliced in a underwater
recorder, and revisited the recorder and dumped its contents any number of
times.

http://www.politrix.org/foia/nsa/nsa-fibertap.htm

"The much more interesting problem that gets rather short shrift in the WSJ
article is how the real time time critical intercepts get from a submarine
hiding in stealth 1200 feet under the ocean to Fort Meade and then to policy
makers. Some fraction of the traffic is still interesting after weeks or
months when tapes or disks can be flown back to Fort Meade but much more of
it is only useful if it is available within seconds or minutes during a
crisis and not weeks or months later. Traditional microwave radio and
satellite intercepts get back to Fort Meade or the RSOCs in milliseconds but
as more and more traffic flows through cables that can only be tapped by
hiding billion dollar nuclear submarines a lot of the timeliness of NSA
operations goes away.

"The IVY BELLS tap technology exmplyed against Soviet analog undersea cables
in the 70s allegedly involved hooking up a nuclear radioisotope powered pod
with tape recorders in it that was left in place for almost a year between
submarine visits to recover the tapes - this would be rather hard to do with
the gigabytes per second flowing through a modern fiber cable - there is no
(unclassified) recording technology with anything like the storage capacity
to record everything or even a significant fraction of everything for that
long a period in a form factor that would fit in a pod on the sea floor.

"According to published accounts, in the early Reagan years the intelligence
community considered running their own fiber cable to the tap site on the
Soviet analog cables to recover the data in real time - I imagine that the
same thing has been considered as a solution to the current problem of
recovering data from undersea fiber taps while it is still fresh enough to
be useful. But in general it is a harder problem than actually tapping the
cable or dealing with the rivers of data it contains.

I'm curious as to how one would tap a fire-optic cable, which depends on total
internal reflection for efficient transmission.

In article ,
says...
I'm curious as to how one would tap a fire-optic cable, which depends on total
internal reflection for efficient transmission.

Couldn't you just throw a repeater/router on it?

Now, tapping it undetected, that's different. But the article didn't
say that, and I imagine that's not possible... I wonder if the vagaries
of undersea communication (storms?) lead to brief outages that would
look roughly the same as a cable interrupt? I'm way out of my depth
here (hah).


--
Jay Levitt |
Wellesley, MA | Hi!
Faster: jay at jay dot eff-em | Where are we going?
http://www.jay.fm | Why am I in this handbasket?

I'm curious as to how one would tap a fire-optic cable, which
depends on total internal reflection for efficient transmission.

Couldn't you just throw a repeater/router on it?

But you'd have to break the connection, at least briefly, to do that, which
would be a tipoff.


Now, tapping it undetected, that's different. But the article didn't
say that, and I imagine that's not possible... I wonder if the vagaries
of undersea communication (storms?) lead to brief outages that would
look roughly the same as a cable interrupt? I'm way out of my depth
here (hah).

That would be the only way to make it work.

Jay Levitt wrote:
In article ,
says...
I'm curious as to how one would tap a fire-optic cable, which depends on total
internal reflection for efficient transmission.

Couldn't you just throw a repeater/router on it?

Yes, which is the problem. You get a dropout in the process. Most of the
"undetectable" processes involve bending the fibre slightly so that there
is some slight leakage of light at the bend point. But this also causes
a slight impedance change at that point as well, which can be detected
with a TDR. On the other hand, the other guys don't necessarily know
what the change is... it could be some natural seabed movement causing
mechanical flexing too. So they have to send someone down to investigate
and that could take some time. But you get very little light off doing
this, which limits you to relatively low bandwidth.

I don't know if these lines are pressurized.... I think that would be hard
to do for an undersea line. But I know that most underground secure lines
are pressurized to a couple atmospheres, so that you can tell if the line
has been breached somewhere by the loss of pressure. This is one of the
tricks that came out of the research after the big tap in Berlin in the
fifties.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

William Sommerwerck wrote:
I'm curious as to how one would tap a fire-optic cable, which depends on total
internal reflection for efficient transmission.


I think it is in the same realm as the "star wars" defense bs. And if
the cable is cut to tap it, doesn't someone on either end of the cable
detect this?

Jay Levitt wrote:

I wonder if the vagaries
of undersea communication (storms?) lead to brief outages that would
look roughly the same as a cable interrupt?

I can't see that. What could a storm or anything else do to a cable to
cause a brief outage? Unless maybe it's a Hosa fiber optic cable.

William Sommerwerck wrote:

I'm curious as to how one would tap a fire-optic cable, which depends on total
internal reflection for efficient transmission.

And ever moreso, how to do that without detection by the cable owner?

"Tap, tap... is this thing on?"

--
ha

"Jay Levitt" wrote in message

In article ,
says...
I'm curious as to how one would tap a fire-optic cable, which
depends on total internal reflection for efficient transmission.

Couldn't you just throw a repeater/router on it?

Now, tapping it undetected, that's different. But the article didn't
say that, and I imagine that's not possible...

What if the head-end equipment was implemented with say, vacuum tubes?

AFAIK the USSR were late adopters of SS technology.

I knew a solider who was stationed in the region where this happened. He
didn't have a lot good to say about his commanders.

"William Sommerwerck" wrote in message
...
I'm curious as to how one would tap a fire-optic cable, which depends on
total
internal reflection for efficient transmission.

I don't think they "tap" the line. They intercept the signal, read it,
regenerate it and send it out again. It's called a repeater.

Norm Strong

wrote:

I don't think they "tap" the line. They intercept the signal, read it,
regenerate it and send it out again. It's called a repeater.


So how do they "intercept" it without tapping the line?

Scott Dorsey wrote:

Yes, which is the problem. You get a dropout in the process. Most of the
"undetectable" processes involve bending the fibre slightly so that there
is some slight leakage of light at the bend point. But this also causes
a slight impedance change at that point as well, which can be detected
with a TDR. On the other hand, the other guys don't necessarily know
what the change is... it could be some natural seabed movement causing
mechanical flexing too. So they have to send someone down to investigate
and that could take some time. But you get very little light off doing
this, which limits you to relatively low bandwidth.

I suppose I understand how this works. But aren't fibre optic cables
usually constructed of thousands of "strands" each carry difference
channels or blocks of channels?

How could you separate individual channels from this mess?

Rob R.

Rob Reedijk wrote:

aren't fibre optic cables usually
constructed of thousands of "strands" each carry difference
channels or blocks of channels?

Terrestrial longhaul networks often use 144 or 216 count fiber. Undersea fiber is a much more specialized beast, and due to the amplifiers needed typically has 4-8 lit fibers (plus a few spares of course.)





How could you separate individual channels from this mess?

It's what technologists call a "non-trivial task."

In article , Kurt Albershardt
wrote:

Rob Reedijk wrote:

aren't fibre optic cables usually
constructed of thousands of "strands" each carry difference
channels or blocks of channels?

Terrestrial longhaul networks often use 144 or 216 count fiber.
Undersea fiber is a much more specialized beast, and due to the amplifiers
needed typically has 4-8 lit fibers (plus a few spares of course.)





How could you separate individual channels from this mess?

I read an article which described some scenarios for this underwater fiber
tapping. As I recall, the theory of how to do it went something like this.
First, you bring a section of the cable into your "manipulation
compartment" which is probably shaped like a large tube on the outside of
the sub. Then the water gets pumped out. Then you use remote manipulators
to operate on the fiber optic cable to add the tap.

Presumably, you could use the "bending" trick that Scott Dorsey described
earlier to add a temporary "bypass" fiber to the cable; then you could cut
the actual fiber, add a "T" connection tap, and tap away.

The article mentioned that these underwater cables carry around 10,000
volts, DC, to power the repeaters. It's that high due to the voltage loss
over the length of the cable. So there you are, a mile or two underwater,
running your remote-control pliers on a 10kV cable. Careful now...

--
Jedd Haas - Artist
http://www.gallerytungsten.com
http://www.epsno.com

Pure fantasy i.m.o.

Jedd Haas wrote:


I read an article which described some scenarios for this underwater fiber
tapping. As I recall, the theory of how to do it went something like this.
First, you bring a section of the cable into your "manipulation
compartment" which is probably shaped like a large tube on the outside of
the sub. Then the water gets pumped out. Then you use remote manipulators
to operate on the fiber optic cable to add the tap.

Presumably, you could use the "bending" trick that Scott Dorsey described
earlier to add a temporary "bypass" fiber to the cable; then you could cut
the actual fiber, add a "T" connection tap, and tap away.

The article mentioned that these underwater cables carry around 10,000
volts, DC, to power the repeaters. It's that high due to the voltage loss
over the length of the cable. So there you are, a mile or two underwater,
running your remote-control pliers on a 10kV cable. Careful now...

On or about Sat, 19 Feb 2005 09:38:40 -0500, Jay Levitt allegedly wrote:

In article ,
says...
I'm curious as to how one would tap a fire-optic cable, which depends on total
internal reflection for efficient transmission.

Couldn't you just throw a repeater/router on it?

They already have repeaters along the cable every x km depending on the
cable clarity. The trunk cables used across Australia have repeaters
about every 20 to 30km. I understand they go for the highest clarity of
glass for deep sea cables to maximise repeater distance to reduce the
number that have to be powered.

Anyway, those repeaters have to have electronics, which opens the
possibility of sniffing around them.


Noel Bachelor noelbachelorAT(From:_domain)
Language Recordings Inc (Darwin Australia)

Noel Bachelor wrote:
On or about Sat, 19 Feb 2005 09:38:40 -0500, Jay Levitt allegedly wrote:

Couldn't you just throw a repeater/router on it?


They already have repeaters along the cable every x km depending on the
cable clarity. The trunk cables used across Australia have repeaters
about every 20 to 30km. I understand they go for the highest clarity of
glass for deep sea cables to maximise repeater distance to reduce the
number that have to be powered.

Anyway, those repeaters have to have electronics, which opens the
possibility of sniffing around them.

The electronics are not signal-carrying; they're more of a light pump (think laser.)

The electronics are not signal-carrying; they're more of a light pump (think
laser.)

They _have_ to demodulate the signal and retransmit it. I don't know any other
way of boosting the level.

William Sommerwerck wrote:
The electronics are not signal-carrying; they're more of a light pump
(think laser.)

They _have_ to demodulate the signal and retransmit it. I don't know any other
way of boosting the level.

Erbium-doped fiber amplifiers have changed the landscape in recent years.

http://www.optronics.gr/Tutorials/fiberamp.htm
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0120845903/

In article ,
William Sommerwerck wrote:
The electronics are not signal-carrying; they're more of a light pump (think
laser.)

They _have_ to demodulate the signal and retransmit it. I don't know any other
way of boosting the level.

There are some really nifty gadgets that basically act as optical amplifiers.
They are really pump lasers that have some kind of erbium salts which can
use a small light source to modulate a larger one. In the late nineties
this created something of a small revolution in the telecom industry.

The bad news is that these things will only operate over a single wavelength
which means fibre systems that use a whole bunch of different wavelength
light sources multiplexed onto a single fibre won't work with them, and
that is also becoming a big technology right now.

With the EDFA "erbium-doped fibre amplifier" you still need a light
source to pump the thing up, so the need to run power out to the repeater
stations isn't totally eliminated, I would suspect.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

(Scott Dorsey) writes:

In article ,
William Sommerwerck wrote:

The electronics are not signal-carrying; they're more of a light pump (think
laser.)

They _have_ to demodulate the signal and retransmit it. I don't know
any other way of boosting the level.

....

With the EDFA "erbium-doped fibre amplifier" you still need a light
source to pump the thing up, so the need to run power out to the
repeater stations isn't totally eliminated, I would suspect.

The real plus is you do not have to fish the cable and upgrade
repeaters to upgrade the link to higher speeds. Just change the
ends, and away you go. The parametric pumping does not care about
the modulation, only the base frequency.

--
Paul Repacholi 1 Crescent Rd.,
+61 (08) 9257-1001 Kalamunda.
West Australia 6076
comp.os.vms,- The Older, Grumpier Slashdot
Raw, Cooked or Well-done, it's all half baked.
EPIC, The Architecture of the future, always has been, always will be.

The real plus is you do not have to fish the cable and upgrade
repeaters to upgrade the link to higher speeds. Just change the
ends, and away you go. The parametric pumping does not care
about the modulation, only the base frequency.

But the modulation creates sidebands. What happens if they're more than a few
percent away from the base frequency?

And it's
hard to see how any monitoring station could suggest anything other
than a
disturbance of unknown origin if some portion of the system fails. I
guess
one might need access to geological disturbance data and realtime
visual
satellite security monitoring to make a reasonable estimation of
whether a
fault was generated by a disturbance of natural occurance as opposed
to a
manned intercession, but still we'd be talking about days unless a sub
happened to be in the general vicinity.


During which time the cable owner makes sure he doesn't use that cable
for highly classified transmissions. The tapping attempt is then
thwarted.

"Noel Bachelor" wrote in message
...
On or about Sat, 19 Feb 2005 09:38:40 -0500, Jay Levitt allegedly wrote:

In article ,
says...
I'm curious as to how one would tap a fire-optic cable, which depends
on total
internal reflection for efficient transmission.

Couldn't you just throw a repeater/router on it?

They already have repeaters along the cable every x km depending on the
cable clarity. The trunk cables used across Australia have repeaters
about every 20 to 30km. I understand they go for the highest clarity of
glass for deep sea cables to maximise repeater distance to reduce the
number that have to be powered.

Anyway, those repeaters have to have electronics, which opens the
possibility of sniffing around them.


Noel Bachelor noelbachelorAT(From:_domain)
Language Recordings Inc (Darwin Australia)

SMOF (Single Mode Optical Fibre) operating at wavelengths of 1550nm or
1625nm carrying digitally multiplexed signals need only be regenerated
(repeated) every 100km. Most of the bigger telcos like Telstra (Australia's
largest telco) regenerate the optical signals every 50km or thereabouts with
high capacity 2.5Gbs/s WDM (wave division multiplexed) terrestrial systems.

Undersea systems require a high voltage (1000's of volts) power feeding
system to power up the regenerators which is fed via thick copper conductor
within the armoured sheathing.

Tapping into the cable would be easiest at a regenerator housing but this
would mean either bringing the cable and the regenerator to the surface or
rigging up a fairly elaborate setup in a submarine.

Tapping the cable at the fibre is possible by accessing the individual
fibres and placing a slight bend in the fibre which allows a small part of
the light travelling in the core to escape into the cladding and eventually
out of the fibre. A suitable and highly sensitive photodiode (Avalanche
Photo diode) would "read" the light pulses and pass these onto a demodulator
and then in turn to demultiplexing equipment to extract individual channels
or circuits.

Tapping into the fibre using the "bend the fibre" technique is the least
intrusive method. However it is only unlikely to go completely undetected
if the tapping is done between two undersea regenerators as OTDRs (Optical
Time Domain Reflectometers) used to locate optical fibre faults can't "see
through" regenerators.

All telecommunications systems (non-military) conform to ITU-T standards and
their variants which makes demultiplexing signals easy. However end users
can still encrypt their signals or data before transmission so simply
demultiplexing them doesn't automatically allow the "tapper" to be able to
decode the message.

Cheers,
Alan